If we are talking realistic sci fi then microcompliant devices and nanomachines (TRUE nanomachines, not just the tiny but nowhere near nanoscale robots we have now)
Smart drugs are already a thing but they are getting much better every year and are pretty sci fi when you dig down into them.
Yeah, flying cars are even worse than land cars. Imagine how much less efficient parking and take off would be. Imagine all those cars circling the sky waiting to park. Would we need to cut down all the urban trees? Would we build even bigger parking lots? Huge runways and landing pads everywhere? It sounds like hell.
Then again, self driving cars would be much safer off the ground. None of that ‘which pedestrian should we run over’ ethical dilemmas that car industry moral philosophers and actuarials currently grapple with.
The Trolley problem doesn’t go away in the air (not that it’s that big of a deal to begin with). In fact, it might even be worse. Your car is falling. Do you crash into the crowded street or the crowded building? Which one? The destructive potential is much higher. If safety is really a concern, don’t you worry about giving every person a missile?
Flying cars “solve” a non-problem, because long distance highway travel is already the least dangerous. Most accidents are at intersections and points of conflicts. But eventually flying cars need to land and be near other cars and people. There will still be traffic jams, vast fields of parking lots, and cities made uncomfortable to actually walk or exist in.
Both of these things can be true. I said it would be safer, you say that when there is trouble, it’d be a much bigger trouble. However, crashing with a rolling car would be a much more common occurrence than with a flying one, where it would basically only happen as a catastrophic malfunction. Nobody would walk out unexpectedly in front of a flying car.
With flying cars we’d have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.
Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we’d take these two ton death machines and say “let’s put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from”? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it’s a completely different scenario. And that’s what we’d have with flying cars. At least I hope so!
I would honestly hope we would be smart enough not to go the road of the car again but instead invest in good public transportation, at least in cities and other densely populated areas. Flying cars, even automated, would be a terrible idea from both risk and energy/climate change perspectives.
No. Since it is impossible, any discussion on it is just speculation. You are saying it is a high tech suicide booth based on how it is portrayed in Trek…Which is fiction.
It’s not though, we’ve already managed to quantum teleport clusters of atoms. If managed on a larger scale, there can be no continuity between consciousness, therefore suicide booth.
I get it, you are just one of those types that loves to argue without thinking. Thankfully lemmy doesn’t use reddit’s stupid blocking method so excising you from my internet forever is painless and entertaining.
What if physicists find a way to bend space such that you’d be able to move instantly (through some sort of portal) between two extremely far places while staying at a normal speed?
Just because quantum teleportation has “teleoprtation” in its name, doesn’t mean it’s the only possible form of it.
Don’t blame others for arguing without thinking if you haven’t given it proper thought yourself.
You have really strong opinions on this considering most of this is purely theoretical.
AFAIK no wormholes were ever observed or created, and there are many theories on how they maybe created (artificially or naturally) and/or traversed.
Also, any I think any reasonable person would say you teleported if he saw you going through a portal.
We also don’t understand consciousness, so no one really knows what happens when you use a ‘suicide booth’ like you imagine. Maybe it’s even possible to just teleport your consciousness too.
You really have no fuckdamn idea how long I have been thinking about this exact subject.
Ok I have come to realize that lemmy is literally no better than reddit when it comes to people who are so arrogant in their ignorance.
Imposing a quantum state on remote matter is the ONLY way teleportation will work. The ‘faxing’ is exactly what large scale teleportation would consist of for every particle state that composes the entity being transported.
You don’t literally send the same particles, you use the particles at the destination to reassemble the original.
Previously I thought it was just reddit that had gotten worse in the last 10 years but I’ve come to understand it’s just the internet in general.
Sure as fuck wish I could go back to the internet before smartphones so all you fuckdamn idiots would stop wasting my time.
We exist as a contiguous, always active self-modifying chemical cascade. This is a scientific fact.
Our sense of consciousness is what we refer to as our selves. This is pretty concrete philosophical conjecture.
Any teleporter device that rearranges atoms breaks this contiguity. This is scientific fact.
If a teleporter device that rearranges atoms can be invented (and I believe it can but not for a long time) to move a human, then the human that arrives on the other end of the teleport will not be the ‘you’ that looks out from your eyes now as the contiguity is broken. It will THINK it is you, will have your memories, but your current consciousness wouldn’t ‘jump’ to that newly created homunculus. It would simply cease to exist. You think this is philosophy but it is a scientific fact.
I’m not arguing for the existence of a ‘soul’ here, just stating the simple truth that a machine that reassembles atoms into you isn’t making a you that exists now, but rather a just-born being who thinks its been living your life.
And the you that exists now ceases to be.
Please don’t try the ‘falling to sleep’ argument, at no point during that time does the complex bioprocess that makes up our being cease.
Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy? And anyway, it’s not a scientific ‘fact’ that your consciousness will do anything at all, the hard problem of consciousness is not yet solved.
Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.
Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.
Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.
The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.
Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.
And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.
If you don’t understand the dangers of mistaking metaphor for wisdom then you are not worth talking with.
AI is an approximation of how humans think cognition works, a metaphor written in code, but is not equivalent in recapitulating human cognition. I am not saying this is a limitation of hardware or software, but rather a limitation of our currently primitive understanding of our cognition.
It is too easy and a path to misdirection to just say ‘Well the cholesterol and nerve bundles are the hardware, and thinking is the software!’, and is JUST as inaccurate as some 1910 hick looking at a new automobile and saying “Oh I get it, it’s a carriage! But where’s the horse?” because in the hick’s mind they think in metaphors of horses pulling things (which is why we still use ‘horesepower to rate car engines’). They could not imagine a reality in which the cart ‘pulled’ itself.
Actual scientists know the dangers of metaphors and use them cautiously, science communicators use metaphors more heavily because that is a shortcut to get laypeoples to understand in some way complex concepts. If you know Terry Pratchett, these things are called ‘lies to children’.
And don’t get me wrong, ‘lies to children’ serve an important purpose, building the foundations of understanding for later growth.
Like saying ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’, which I learned in 3rd grade.
It’s a lie to children of course, the process that the sun uses to convert hydrogen to energy is a FUCKTONNE more complicated than an 8 year old can understand, but the ‘lie to children’ that it does means that when I hit highschool and start learning physics and do the chapter on solar fusion, the framework of understanding is there while I come to grips with random electron walks and density shells.
‘The brain is the hardware and thought is the software’ is ‘lies to children’, and no more useful to the discussion than telling people ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’ in a scholarly discussion of stellar development. At best it will make everyone feel a little condescending towards you, at worst you derail the discussion.
Yeah, they’re called helicopters and we rightfully regulate the shit out of them because flying without proper certifications and inspections is extremely dangerous for the public. Because when one idiot crashes, it won’t only be him going out, but he will cause destruction and carnage on the ground.
Star trek teleportation is a suicide booth, but wormholes can do the same thing. Just bend space to bring two points together, step through the hole and unbend. Teleportation without disassembly.
Did you not see my earlier comment about tidal spaghettification?
Sure there’s no disassembly but nothing living can survive that deformation and same with most materials. Basically the only thing you can send through wormholes are raw materials or anything you don’t mind ending up seven hundred times longer and commensurately thinner.
Teleportation is just a high tech suicide booth.
If we are talking realistic sci fi then microcompliant devices and nanomachines (TRUE nanomachines, not just the tiny but nowhere near nanoscale robots we have now)
Smart drugs are already a thing but they are getting much better every year and are pretty sci fi when you dig down into them.
Flying cars. We have the tech already.
Nah fam, I’m good on that one. I see enough carnage on the roads with normal cars.
Yeah, flying cars are even worse than land cars. Imagine how much less efficient parking and take off would be. Imagine all those cars circling the sky waiting to park. Would we need to cut down all the urban trees? Would we build even bigger parking lots? Huge runways and landing pads everywhere? It sounds like hell.
Another good point. Ever heard a helicopter land? That’s what flying car highways will sound like nonstop
But at least in an emergency they’ll always land on their tyres.
Also imagine ending up in a car crash when you’re like, 100 metres above the ground.
Then again, self driving cars would be much safer off the ground. None of that ‘which pedestrian should we run over’ ethical dilemmas that car industry moral philosophers and actuarials currently grapple with.
Which pedestrian should we crash on is the new hot debate.
The Trolley problem doesn’t go away in the air (not that it’s that big of a deal to begin with). In fact, it might even be worse. Your car is falling. Do you crash into the crowded street or the crowded building? Which one? The destructive potential is much higher. If safety is really a concern, don’t you worry about giving every person a missile?
Flying cars “solve” a non-problem, because long distance highway travel is already the least dangerous. Most accidents are at intersections and points of conflicts. But eventually flying cars need to land and be near other cars and people. There will still be traffic jams, vast fields of parking lots, and cities made uncomfortable to actually walk or exist in.
Both of these things can be true. I said it would be safer, you say that when there is trouble, it’d be a much bigger trouble. However, crashing with a rolling car would be a much more common occurrence than with a flying one, where it would basically only happen as a catastrophic malfunction. Nobody would walk out unexpectedly in front of a flying car.
“Which building do I fly into”
I bet if flying cars happen people will not be piloting them. They’ll act more like personal train cars, joining others in orderly movement
Maybe a bunch of people could share one big one, like some kind of flying bus.
You mean sit in the same vehicle as you peasants?
Preposterous!
/s
With flying cars we’d have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.
Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we’d take these two ton death machines and say “let’s put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from”? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.
The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it’s a completely different scenario. And that’s what we’d have with flying cars. At least I hope so!
I would honestly hope we would be smart enough not to go the road of the car again but instead invest in good public transportation, at least in cities and other densely populated areas. Flying cars, even automated, would be a terrible idea from both risk and energy/climate change perspectives.
flying cars it is then . . . I’m sure tesla is working on it already.
That’s a matter of opinion.
No, science.
No. Since it is impossible, any discussion on it is just speculation. You are saying it is a high tech suicide booth based on how it is portrayed in Trek…Which is fiction.
Same with time travel.
It’s not though, we’ve already managed to quantum teleport clusters of atoms. If managed on a larger scale, there can be no continuity between consciousness, therefore suicide booth.
I get it, you are just one of those types that loves to argue without thinking. Thankfully lemmy doesn’t use reddit’s stupid blocking method so excising you from my internet forever is painless and entertaining.
What if physicists find a way to bend space such that you’d be able to move instantly (through some sort of portal) between two extremely far places while staying at a normal speed?
Just because quantum teleportation has “teleoprtation” in its name, doesn’t mean it’s the only possible form of it.
Don’t blame others for arguing without thinking if you haven’t given it proper thought yourself.
The gravity needed to even create small hypothetical spacetime bridges would spaghettify any normal matter passing through it.
It kind of does. Wormholes are not teleportation. ANY method that ‘moves’ atoms from one place to another falls under the ‘suicide booth’ category.
You really have no fuckdamn idea how long I have been thinking about this exact subject.
You have really strong opinions on this considering most of this is purely theoretical.
AFAIK no wormholes were ever observed or created, and there are many theories on how they maybe created (artificially or naturally) and/or traversed.
Also, any I think any reasonable person would say you teleported if he saw you going through a portal.
We also don’t understand consciousness, so no one really knows what happens when you use a ‘suicide booth’ like you imagine. Maybe it’s even possible to just teleport your consciousness too.
Neither do you.
See, that’s the problem with modern science reporting. People are so easily confused.
No. We have never teleported atoms.
We did the equivalent of a fax machine.
We took an atoms current state, sent that information down traditional communication lines, and copied it’s state perfectly to another atom.
They call it Quantum Teleportation, but it has nothing to do with Sci-Fi teleportation as most people think of it.
Ok I have come to realize that lemmy is literally no better than reddit when it comes to people who are so arrogant in their ignorance.
Imposing a quantum state on remote matter is the ONLY way teleportation will work. The ‘faxing’ is exactly what large scale teleportation would consist of for every particle state that composes the entity being transported.
You don’t literally send the same particles, you use the particles at the destination to reassemble the original.
Previously I thought it was just reddit that had gotten worse in the last 10 years but I’ve come to understand it’s just the internet in general.
Sure as fuck wish I could go back to the internet before smartphones so all you fuckdamn idiots would stop wasting my time.
Ok I have come to realize that lemmy is literally no better than reddit when it comes to people who are so arrogant in their ignorance.
Or the common denominator is you’re clueless.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/645/713/888.jpg
Don’t be mad, it’s gonna be ok.
No, philosophy.
Not really.
We exist as a contiguous, always active self-modifying chemical cascade. This is a scientific fact.
Our sense of consciousness is what we refer to as our selves. This is pretty concrete philosophical conjecture.
Any teleporter device that rearranges atoms breaks this contiguity. This is scientific fact.
If a teleporter device that rearranges atoms can be invented (and I believe it can but not for a long time) to move a human, then the human that arrives on the other end of the teleport will not be the ‘you’ that looks out from your eyes now as the contiguity is broken. It will THINK it is you, will have your memories, but your current consciousness wouldn’t ‘jump’ to that newly created homunculus. It would simply cease to exist. You think this is philosophy but it is a scientific fact.
I’m not arguing for the existence of a ‘soul’ here, just stating the simple truth that a machine that reassembles atoms into you isn’t making a you that exists now, but rather a just-born being who thinks its been living your life.
And the you that exists now ceases to be.
Please don’t try the ‘falling to sleep’ argument, at no point during that time does the complex bioprocess that makes up our being cease.
Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy? And anyway, it’s not a scientific ‘fact’ that your consciousness will do anything at all, the hard problem of consciousness is not yet solved.
Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.
Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.
Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.
The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.
Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.
And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.
If you don’t understand the dangers of mistaking metaphor for wisdom then you are not worth talking with.
AI is an approximation of how humans think cognition works, a metaphor written in code, but is not equivalent in recapitulating human cognition. I am not saying this is a limitation of hardware or software, but rather a limitation of our currently primitive understanding of our cognition.
It is too easy and a path to misdirection to just say ‘Well the cholesterol and nerve bundles are the hardware, and thinking is the software!’, and is JUST as inaccurate as some 1910 hick looking at a new automobile and saying “Oh I get it, it’s a carriage! But where’s the horse?” because in the hick’s mind they think in metaphors of horses pulling things (which is why we still use ‘horesepower to rate car engines’). They could not imagine a reality in which the cart ‘pulled’ itself.
Actual scientists know the dangers of metaphors and use them cautiously, science communicators use metaphors more heavily because that is a shortcut to get laypeoples to understand in some way complex concepts. If you know Terry Pratchett, these things are called ‘lies to children’.
And don’t get me wrong, ‘lies to children’ serve an important purpose, building the foundations of understanding for later growth.
Like saying ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’, which I learned in 3rd grade.
It’s a lie to children of course, the process that the sun uses to convert hydrogen to energy is a FUCKTONNE more complicated than an 8 year old can understand, but the ‘lie to children’ that it does means that when I hit highschool and start learning physics and do the chapter on solar fusion, the framework of understanding is there while I come to grips with random electron walks and density shells.
‘The brain is the hardware and thought is the software’ is ‘lies to children’, and no more useful to the discussion than telling people ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’ in a scholarly discussion of stellar development. At best it will make everyone feel a little condescending towards you, at worst you derail the discussion.
Yeah, they’re called helicopters and we rightfully regulate the shit out of them because flying without proper certifications and inspections is extremely dangerous for the public. Because when one idiot crashes, it won’t only be him going out, but he will cause destruction and carnage on the ground.
Star trek teleportation is a suicide booth, but wormholes can do the same thing. Just bend space to bring two points together, step through the hole and unbend. Teleportation without disassembly.
Did you not see my earlier comment about tidal spaghettification?
Sure there’s no disassembly but nothing living can survive that deformation and same with most materials. Basically the only thing you can send through wormholes are raw materials or anything you don’t mind ending up seven hundred times longer and commensurately thinner.
Medicine is a huge emerging field right now, and there’s so much potential for benefit from humanity depending on how well we can govern this new tech
We are getting very close to commercially viable 3d printed livers, granted that’s like the EASIEST organ to culture but it is still amazing to me.